Thursday, December 26, 2013

Scott Fife’s LeRoy, the Big Pup

A few years ago I took a workshop from sculptor Scott Fife at the Pratt Fine Arts Center. The workshop’s focus was using ordinary corrugated
cardboard as a sculpting medium by attaching sheets together with wood glue and
wallboard nails. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of sculpting with cardboard, but
I was a huge fan of Fife’s work, and I decided I was willing to give his medium
a try just to learn a little about how he works.

I did, indeed, learn a lot about working in three
dimensions, and using such an inexpensive, commonplace material gave us permission
to be as experimental as we wanted to be. While some students created impressive
figurative sculptures (one was of Amy Winehouse, the young vocalist who had
recently died, and another was a large penguin-like bird), mine was more. . . shall
we say “organic” and “freeform” (I’m being generous; see below). Ultimately, my sculpture
ended up in the recycle bin (and thankfully, because it was made of cardboard,
it could go in there instead of the trash bin), and I decided that working with
cardboard was not really my thing. Nonetheless, my admiration for Scott Fife’s
work continues.

For quite a while, one of my favorite Fife works, “LeRoy, the
Big Pup,” commanded a large, soulful presence on the main floor of the Tacoma Art Museum. Eventually the piece
moved to a permanent location on an upper floor, and the beloved piece is so
popular that LeRoy has become a museum icon. After visiting the LeMay Car Museum, Greg and I went
through TAM’s exhibits, and I stopped for a few minutes to sketch LeRoy, who
stands more than 11 feet tall.

At right and above are two views of my cardboard sculpture, which eventually was recycled.